Saturday, July 27, 2013

The last person Zac expects in the room next door is a girl like Mia, angry and feisty with questionable taste in music. In the real world, he wouldn’t—couldn’t—be friends with her. In hospital different rules apply, and what begins as a knock on the wall leads to a note—then a friendship neither of them sees coming.

You need courage to be in hospital; different courage to be back in the real world. In one of these worlds Zac needs Mia. And in the other Mia needs Zac. Or maybe they both need each other, always.

In A Nutshell:

Zac and Mia is a heartfelt, emotional, uplifting and raw novel about cancer, friendship and hope. It is an amazing story and I hope you’ll love it as much as I do.

My Review:

Upon finishing Zac and Mia, words failed me. I can’t think of a book more deserving to win the Text Prize. Set in Western Australia, the novel is the story of Zac and Mia, two seventeen year olds with different types of cancer. The story, told in their alternating perspectives, illustrates two very different journeys that these kids must face at such a young age.

It is honest and raw and doesn’t hold back on the brutality of cancer, sharing what Zac and Mia experience: the chemo, losing their hair, the isolation (both physically and mentally), boredom, medications, the debilitating effects, statistics, overbearing parents, stages of denial, feelings of hopelessness and a desire not to be pitied.

But the story is also heartfelt, emotional and uplifting. It is not a miserable ‘sick-lit’ about two teenagers dying. It is a story about Zac and Mia, who, under horrible circumstances, meet and form a bond that can only be created when experiencing something significant together.

It is a story about how people react and handle the challenges they are faced with. A story of hope and not giving up. It is recognising and appreciating life and the simple things that others take for granted. It is about helping one another and offering support in any way, shape or form and being there even when they push you away. It is finding someone who understands you and coming to terms with your own reality. It is recognising that your life has changed but you don’t have to be defined by the cancer.

Please read Zac and Mia. You will not regret it.

I wash my hands, amused by the reflection in the mirror.

My head is
bald, lumpy and asymmetrical, but my eyebrows are thicker than before.

I
appear to be morphing into one of those creepy guys from Guess Who. – Zac page 18

To celebrate the release of Zac and Mia, the third book by Australian author A.J. Betts and winner of the 2012 Text Prize for Young Adult and Children's Writing, I am participating in a blog tour along with a bunch of other lovely bloggers. You can see the other tour stops here. Thanks to Text Publishing, I have a copy of Zac and Mia to give away!

To enter, you must be a follower of this blog and live in Australia. Please fill out the form below. Entries close 27th August 2013 and the winner will be contacted via email.

**Update**This competition is now closed. The winner has been contacted via email.Thank you to all who entered :)

Friday, July 12, 2013

Life in Outer Space is a
romantic comedy about a movie geek & the dream girl he refuses to
fall in love with. Sam Kinnison is a geek, and he’s totally fine with
that. He has his horror movies, his nerdy friends, World of Warcraft –
and until Princess Leia turns up in his bedroom, worry about girls he
won't. Then Camilla Carter arrives on the scene. She’s beautiful,
friendly and completely irrelevant to his plan. Sam is determined to
ignore her, except that Camilla has a plan of her own – and he seems
to be a part of it! Sam believes that everything he needs to know he can
learn from the movies. But perhaps he’s been watching the wrong ones.

In A Nutshell:

Life in Outer Space is a story about acceptance, loyalty to friends, appreciating differences, recognising first love, and the crazy awkwardness that is teen life. It also covers the fear of potentially ruining an amazing friendship when you fall for a friend and also realising that as long as you have a couple of close friends, you can survive anything. This geek rom-com is funny, adorable and sometimes awkward and I totally fell in love with it.

My Review:Oh gosh, I loved Life in Outer Space and spent the whole book with a goofy smile on my face. I love stories about geeks/nerds coming into their own and finding ‘their people’. The story of Sam and his friends Mike, Adrian and Allison, is filled with geek-tastic references from World of Warcraft and Star Wars to old school horror movies, Dirty Dancing and Harry Potter. And you don’t have to be a fan of these specifically, to appreciate and love the book. Anyone who has ever loved something that goes against what is said to be ‘popular’ will be able to appreciate and fall in love with the characters found in Life in Outer Space.

High school, as Sam and his friends have come to expect, features daily doses of suckiness aimed at them by ‘The Vessels of Wank’ and their minions (read: the ‘popular’ kids) and they spend their lunch breaks hanging out with the IT guy in what they call their ‘Neutral Zone’. But when quirky but ‘cool’ new girl Camilla arrives, everything they have come to expect goes haywire as Camilla assimilates with all the social groups at Bowen Lakes Secondary High. At first Sam is suspicious of Camilla and questions why she wants to spend time with him and his friends, while she still hangs out with the 'Vessels', but he slowly comes to realise that she is somehow impervious to the social cliques around her. As Sam, Mike, Allison and Adrian navigate their way through the change of social structure and a drop in ‘Vessel’ attacks against them, they also discover that Camilla is a closet geek and begins spending exponential amounts of time with them.

Some things I love about Life in Outer Space:

Sam’s dislike of exclamation points and glitter

The tasks Camilla sets Sam to keep his mind busy when he is sad

Sam’s attempts at writing a cult classic and his screenplay for Killer Cats from the Third Moon of Jupiter

Camilla’s hidden musical talents

Sam, after realising he has a crush on Camilla, tries to make it go away by avoiding her, thinking three days should be sufficient

How Allison evolves throughout the book

Mike showing off his abs at the beach as the ‘popular’ girls fawn over him, not realising he is gay

How Adrian just gets on with life and doesn’t let the little things worry him

Camilla’s stage fright

Life in Outer Space is a story about acceptance, loyalty to friends, appreciating differences, recognising first love, and the crazy awkwardness that is teen life. It also covers the fear of potentially ruining an amazing friendship when you fall for a friend and also realising that as long as you have a couple of close friends, you can survive anything. This geek rom-com is funny, adorable and sometimes awkward and I totally fell in love with it.